INFLUENCE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 55 7 



temperate zone, near the parallel of Thinae or Athens, which 

 passes through the Atlantic Ocean, besides the world we 

 inhabit, there may be one or more other worlds peopled by 

 beings different from ourselves." It is astonishing that this 

 expression did not attract the attention of Spanish writers, 

 who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, believed that 

 they everywhere, in classical authors, found the traces of a 

 knowledge of the new world. 



" Since," as Strabo well observes, " in all works of art which 

 are designed to represent something great, the object aimed at is 

 not the completeness of the individual parts," his chief desire, in 

 his gigantic work, is pre-eminently to direct attention to the form 

 of the w r hole. This tendency towards a generalisation of ideas 

 did not prevent him, at the same time, from prosecuting re- 

 searches which led to the establishment of a large number of 

 admirable physical results, referring more especially to geog- 

 nosy.* He entered, like Posidonius and Polybius, into the con- 

 sideration of the influence of the longer or shorter interval that 

 occurred between each passage of the sun across the zenith ; of 

 the maximum of atmospheric heat under the tropics and the 

 equator ; of the various- causes which give rise to the changes 

 experienced by the earth's surface; of the breaking forth of 

 originally closed seas ; of the general level of the sea, which was 

 already recognised by Archimedes; of oceanic currents; of 

 the eruption of submarine volcanoes; of the petrifactions of 

 shells and the impressions of fishes ; and lastly, of the periodic 



harbour in the land of Tsin ; and that therefore one Thinse (Tzinitza) may 

 have been designated north of the equator, and another south of the 

 equator. 



* Strabo, lib. i. pp. 49-60, lib. ii. pp. 95 and 97, lib. vi. p. 277, lib. xvii. 

 p. 830. On the elevation of islands and of continents, see particu- 

 larly lib. i. pp. 51, 54, and 59. The old Eleat Xenophanes was led to 

 conclude, from the numerous fossil marine productions found at a dis- 

 tance from the sea, that " the present dry ground had been raised from 

 the bottom of the sea," (Origen, Philosophumena, cap. 4). Apuleius 

 collected fossils at the time of the Antonines from the Gsetulian (Mauri- 

 tanian) mountains, and attributed them to the Deucalion flood, to which 

 he ascribed the same character of universality, as the Hebrews to the 

 Deluge of Noah, and the Mexican Azteks to that of the Coxcox. Pro- 

 fessor Franz, by means of very careful investigation, has refuted the 

 belief entertained by Beckmann and Cuvier, that Apuleius possessed a 

 collection of specimens of natural history. (See Beckmann's History of 

 Inventions, Bohn's Standard Library (1840), vol. i. p. 285; ani Hist, 

 des Sciences nat. } t. i. p. 350.) 



